Braving the ice

The photograph you show of a Greenland glacier is not the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier mentioned in the accompanying story (July 30, p 4). No captain in their right mind would risk a vessel on the almost 30-kilometre voyage up the fjord to the Kangerdlugssuaq's snout, even in the rare years when this would be possible.

A rate of advance of 1.6 metres per day for this glacier is not surprising, nor is the supposition that "the glacier is speeding up because melting ice is lubricating the rock beneath". This is a gigantic glacier fed by the main ice cap and by many tributary glaciers, all of which have innumerable crevasses down which hundreds of streams and small rivers pour huge volumes of water in July and August.

The first aerial photographs of the region date only from the early 1980s, so information on earlier flow rates is sparse. A tripling of ...

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